Cons:

It's been an interesting road for Sam and Max, the dog detective and his insanely violent rabbity-thing sidekick. First they were missing in action for over a decade. When the pair finally returned to the adventure game format in a series of six short "episodic" games they suffered from wildly varying quality as Telltale Games came to grips with both the challenges of releasing a new episode every month and finding the pair's unique voice. To judge by Episode 6, however, all that's behind them. While not the strongest episode in Season One, The Bright Side of the Moon displays a nice balance between the needs of the script and needs of the game. Episode 6 boasts a really funny script with challenging but eminently fair puzzles. All in all, it's a nice way to end Season One.

Episode 6 concludes the season-long storyline in which Sam and Max have dealt with Roy G. Biv, a mysterious mastermind bent on hypnotizing everyone on Earth. What began with Brady Culture's hypnotic videotapes in Episode 1 and moved on to a mesmerized talk show host, remote-controlled teddy bears and a mind-controlled President of the United States concludes here with the pair's final confrontation with the evil puppet-master himself in the "Blister of Tranquility" on the moon. It seems almost everyone on Earth is now under Biv's control, including Sam and Max's goldfish and houseplant. This allows the developers to bring back virtually every character we've met in the series to date in order to save the Earth from becoming a Hellish landscape filled with peace, harmony and brotherly love.

The need to resolve the season's storyline is actually the biggest strike against the game. Unlike previous episodes, where the actual plot was secondary to the over-the-top satire of modern American life, this time around the pair's battle to save the Earth from universal happiness actually takes center stage. Sam and Max are never at their best when they try to be logically consistent so the attempt to tie up all the loose threads of the plot tends to cut down on the gleefully chaotic satire that epitomize Sam and Max.

The plot hinges on the cult of Prismatology -- a cross between Scientology and the kind of pop psychology self-help silliness peddled on Oprah and Dr. Phil. The bulk of the game involves the pair interacting with the bizarre cast of characters they've accumulated this season and the much of the humor relies on the audience knowing the quirks and foibles of these characters rather than anything inherent in the fact that Sam and Max just drove to the Moon in a Cadillac Eldorado. There's also the game's rather disappointing ending. It's not bad, just kind of short and not really the payoff I was expecting after sticking with the story for six months.

That's not to say that the script isn't funny. Robot Abraham Lincoln's head (his robotic body was destroyed by a nuclear missile in Episode 4) is a particular stand-out. Robo-Abe has decided that politics is for suckers and is now focused on what's truly important in life -- babes. His hilarious new relationship with Sybil (the pair's job-hopping neighbor) is a scream and their budding romance finally gives Sybil a chance to shine after being sidelined for much of the series. This time it's perpetually paranoid convenience store owner Bosco who gets the short end of the stick. While he gets in a couple of good lines, his disguising himself as his own mother just isn't that funny. The remaining characters are similarly hit and miss. Aspiring chicken thespian Mr. Pennyworth is a hoot, but the gaggle of obsolete computers with self-esteem issues never manage to raise more than a few chuckles. I did enjoy their new videogame ("Tic Tac Doom"), though.